It doesn't take a genius to know why I'm unhappy with Crysis. This is supposed to be technical achievement of the year. Well, I'm having trouble seeing it. This is my computer running Unreal Tournament 3. (both details settings at 4, post processing at Vivid - 30fps - which I believe is the fps limiter kicking in)
(Click on the thumbnail to see the whole picture. A note? UT3's default for my computers made the game look really really bad. Most games do that when they autodetect my settings - funnily enough, I didn't expect to have to turn up the settings up to 4 to find the REAL optimal settings that it should've found to begin with.)
This is my computer running Call of Duty 4 - practically default (optimal settings from autodetect), besides my turning up the anistropic filtering and resolution up from 1024*768 - runs at 30fps - also fps limiter, if I'm not wrong.
(Click on the thumbnail to see the whole picture. Second screen is from multiplayer. I haven't played far enough to get to the outdoors section yet - but I've already played it on the XBox 360.)
This is my computer running Crysis. (been tweaked till the moon turns orange - it's as smooth as it gets after tweaking everything - optimal defaults look horrible)
(Playable settings - roughly 21-30fps)
(Slightly higher quality settings - roughly 12-16fps)
(Click on the thumbnail to see the whole picture.)
The screenshots are taken after I have adjusted every possible setting in the normal menu - yes, I know nowadays you can tweak the .INI file down to every detail, but if the game doesn't have the option in the menu, I figure I'm better off not tweaking it. Everything is running at 1024 by 768. Everything I have tweaked to achieve a general 30-40 frames per second - no point turning everything up if I can't play it that way.
If you can see from the screenshots above - yes, my biggest complaint is simple. Crysis graphics may look nice if you can turn everything up - but if you can't, you are left with crap. I don't mind if the lighting is less realistic, the trees look like any other lousy trees, but it's another thing when objects which most games have no problem rendering nicely start looking worse than games running on (I'll stress) identical hardware. My computer is far from crap, and while it can't do crazy 1680 by 1050 at 30fps, it can sure as hell pull through (and look good while it's at it) at 1024 by 768. As much as people are calling it beautiful and such - im my opinion, the ability to downscale is huge, especially since the gameplay is relatively weak. While people might call my computer weak, it sure as hell ain't a pushover - and I'm as sure as hell Crysis could use some massive optimisations.
(And yes, despite what Crytek says, Crysis should run fine on a console if they worked hard enough to optimize their work. Realize the Bioshock PC does look better than it's XBox 360 counterpart - I'm quite sure console owners wouldn't mind it looking worse as long as they can play it. Of course, there's the issue of gameplay - but Crysis feels very much like a console game to me - just eats a lot of virtual memory for some reason.)
It is a bad comparison since I am comparing leaves to lack of any greenery whatsoever, but what about the normal objects? Even on my crappy computer, non-tree objects deserve more attention than none.